Poetry

creases

Uzayer Masud

10 May 2022 — 1 min read

Bettendorf, IA | November 1, 2022

i exist in the smallest of spaces
in the underside of a bed
a corner of a balcony

the plants are my friends
they exist in tree-time
grounded in reality

i dont want to take up more space
i dont know how to fight
i just want to go home

sitting on a chair feels too foreign
too grown up, fast paced
everyone is scary

i'd rather sit on the floor
see the world through the gaps in leaves
watch the sky grow bigger and the clouds drift apart

i unbecome unto myself

i miss the warmth
my soft unbroken lips

you're a child until you're not anymore
the lines feel hazy
i dont know where it starts or ends

the facial hair feels alien
the heaviness kicked in
lethargic to the core
how is it on me in the first place

i am tired of fighting
of struggling to live
i simply wish to exist

to love in simple ways
this softness will be the death of me

I wrote this when I was 17 and lost someone I loved to alt-right fanaticism. I was hurt. He was enamoured by ragebait. I had lost softness. I had no idea how to grieve - the hurt or what the hurt represented. I just knew I had lost. First time I realised writing could be therapeutic.

the summer (2021) i learned what gold means

I. it was the month my father left and my mother learned how to laugh again i sat down for lunch in the same construed table with trinkets collected over years as she and i pulled the afternoon apart with a fork she always wore a gold bracelet dulled by

the etymology of love

i. dhaka unfolds me with its stenches traffic and what- not ii. the sun spills on the sidewalk like runny yellow yolk folk music i hear on dirt sometimes holds my attention elastic iii. beneath five floors two children make a paradise out of one pile of sand. five fingers

Nazrul's Immaculate Rizz - My Experience with Bangla and Internet Culture

My relationship with the language I was born with has changed significantly over time, and this particular metamorphosis has come at a time of self-actualisation as I grow into adulthood. I strongly believe that language shapes the way we perceive the world. There is the English I speak and breathe,

of wanting to go home

a thousand leaves, more than a thousand in fact green on brown on green on brown, waving, unanimously swing in open defiance of my frustration with this godforsaken land and perhaps for the first time in years i feel like a child bruiseless, in awe, with a tinge of melancholic

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the summer (2021) i learned what gold means

the etymology of love

Nazrul's Immaculate Rizz - My Experience with Bangla and Internet Culture

of wanting to go home